I have thought at times that HN was a place of rational, deep discussion. I cant understand where these types of endless emotional rantings come from. Everyone is going with a bigger hyperbole how "Google is killing GCP, they r so dum".
I can understand their ambitious plans, and naturally you decrease funding for a project if it keeps hemorrhaging money. It says the Google C-suite discussed the idea of leaving the market, as any rational person would do, but dismissed it. I think the way article describes these things is putting a whole of color on this.
But so what, Google thinks it can beat AWS and Azure? Well, it's good they have big goals. Such a heavy bet on their cloud business seems quite sensible, and while they mention cutting spending if they don't achieve those goals, I don't see it as a big of problem as people seem to think. I mean other cloud providers don't even have that amount of money to put into their cloud businesses' and no one is lamenting about that.
To me this whole debate should be about how impractical and out of touch with customers Google has become since.. I can't even recall. Maybe it's the algorithm-based engineer interviews but something's wrong with Google's internal workings. Google Analytics' dashboard is still terrible, I don't like even how Google Docs work, Youtube is I guess ok but they blundered the live-streaming et cetera. I've never used GCP but it always seemed a bit too over-designed and flashy and, well, not practical. On the other hand AWS's console, even though it is at times unintuitive it feels for some reason quite nice and practical. It's weird and subjective, I know.
Could it be that when I had my first touch with AWS I had been given a quite positive view of the whole service vs. I have quite negative prior feelings about other Google services that cloud my judgement. Who knows.
Yet still, perhaps Googlers at their fancy Mountain View office have become a bit too detached from the regular Joes working for their gray corporate masters who want nothing to do with their hipster dashboards and just want something simple that works. Maybe pride comes before a fall, like with Microsoft. Luckily for MSFT Nadella started to change their culture.